Tuesday, January 22, 2008

In 2002, a small group of foundation officials and technology experts released the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which called for journals to end subscription barriers to online content and for scholars to strive to make their research findings available online and free. While many publishers that charge for content have attacked these ideas, the Budapest manifesto played a key role in a movement that is seeing notable success. The new appropriations bill for the National Institutes of Health contains a provision — fought for several years by publishers but backed by many academics — that requires all studies financed by the NIH to be made available online and free.

Today, some of the same groups that created the Budapest movement are unveiling a new manifesto — the Cape Town Open Education Declaration — in which they call on universities and others to make more of their course and other educational materials online and free, and to encourage faculty members to work with these materials. Declaring that “we are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning,” the signatories affirm that “everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.”

Among those backing the effort are the Open Society Institute (which is linked to the Soros Foundation), the Shuttleworth Foundation (which is heavily involved in promoting education in Africa), Creative Commons, and numerous educators involved in open access projects....

The statement is being issued at a time that numerous efforts already exist to make course content available online and free. Projects like OpenCourseWare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Connexions at Rice University are putting vast sums of materials online and making them available. Yale University is making video of selected courses available.

Richard Baraniuk, the founder of Connexions and one of the Cape Town signatories, said that with many projects and ideas taking hold, organizers of the new effort wanted to draw attention to the way a movement is taking shape. “We want more people out there familiar with the fact that there’s not just a Yale project or an MIT project or a Connexions project, but that they are part of this whole,” he said. “We have these projects that have been founded by people with a vision about what open education can be, and how it can revolutionize the world of education. What has dawned on people the last year or so, was that a movement was starting to crystallize around these projects.”

While not all educators may gravitate to these ideas right away, Baraniuk noted the success of the Budapest effort in shaping opinion, and now legislation. As with Budapest, the idea is to have key principles, but not a ton of detail on how to apply those principles. “The language was very carefully worked out over a number of months,” he said. “The idea is not to be vague, but to be open-ended enough to be used in different ways.” ...

Specifically, the Cape Town declaration has three calls:

Educators and learners: “We encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.”

Resources: “We call on educators, authors, publishers and institutions to release their resources openly. These open educational resources should be freely shared through open licenses which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.”

Policy: “Governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections....

As the founders of two of the world's largest open-source media platforms - Wikipedia and Connexions - we have both been accused of being dreamers....

Now, with the support of untold legions of people from Nobel laureates to junior high school kids sitting in the back rows of classrooms, from East Timor the long way around to East Los Angeles, Wikipedia and Connexions have spread around the globe and today are organic, growing, information bases used by hundreds of millions of people.

We want to infect you with the dream that anyone can become part of a new movement with the potential to change the world of education: A movement that can redefine forever how knowledge is created and used. Imagine a world where textbooks and other learning materials are available to everyone for free over the Web and at low-cost in print. (Today, some community college students have to drop out because their textbooks cost more than their tuition; and today, some third-graders have to share math texts because there aren't enough to go around.)

Imagine textbooks adapted to many learning styles and translated into myriad languages. (Today, language barriers prevent many immigrant parents from helping their children with their homework because the texts are only in English.) Imagine textbooks that are continually updated and corrected by a legion of contributors. (Today, Pluto remains in the list of planets in the nation's science textbooks, and who knows how long it will take for it to be removed.) ...

But the puzzle pieces of the Open Education movement have now come together so that anyone, anywhere, can author, assemble, customize and publish their own open course or textbook. Open licenses make the materials legal to use and remix. Technical innovations like XML and print-on-demand make delivering the output technically feasible and inexpensive....

The exciting thing about Open Education is that free access is just the beginning. Open Education promises to turn the textbook production pipeline into a vast dynamic knowledge ecosystem that is in a constant state of creation, use, reuse and improvement. Open Education promises to provide children with learning materials tailored to their individual needs in contrast to today's "off the rack" materials. Open Education promises quicker feedback loops that couple student learning outcomes more directly into content development and improvement. And Open Education promises new approaches to collaborative learning that leverage social interaction among students and teachers worldwide....

Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/22/2008 11:02:00 AM.

The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.